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APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA
APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA THE scope of fiction? Why "scope"? The word implies breadth of choice and treatment, and that in an art already dangerously subversive of the present age's vitalizing prin¬ciple of conduct, benevolent censor¬ship. That way peril lies. Let us endeavor to approach this subject from the view-point of that admirable organization, so represen¬tative of our best and most decorous minds, the League for the Promotion of Prudery. As the League points out in its introductory enunciation of principles, the error and sin of mod¬ernist literature is that it tends to por¬tray life as it is. All respectable per¬sons realize that life in many of its phases is wholly unfit for the consid¬eration of the pure. Take, for ex¬ample, the regrettable matter of birth and all that precedes it. If our novel¬ists, playwrights and publicists would unanimously agree to refrain from any mention of natal or pre-natal pro¬cesses, is it too much to hope that we could presently raise up a generation which should retain its unsullied men¬tal innocency until, let us say, the legal age of twenty-one, or even con¬ceivably later? Leave these undesir¬able matters to the biologists. No¬body reads biology anyway. It is gratifying to note that the great and virtuous commonwealth of Penn¬Rylvania has already initiated the good irk by barring from its motion pic ire theaters any indication of how pulation is maintained. A young couple, though they be pasted over with marriage certificates thick as hotel labels on a bargain-sale trunk, may not be shown in the provocative act of purchasing a perambulator for a prospective baby. Even that galli¬naceous makeshift, the stork, is ban¬ished from the screen. Ohio is not far behind. A publisher who ventured to invade its unsullied borders with an edition of Rabelais has been appre¬hended. In this propitious soil the League for the Promotion of Prudery is quietly working to have the Bible expurgated and the Talmud revised. Shakespeare must go. , Eventually as public support ac¬crues to the League and after it has cleansed and disinfected fiction, poetry and the drama, it purposes to direct its attention to art and jour¬nalism. It must not be inferred that all imaginative creation, per se, is inter¬dicted. Writers may still hold the mirror up to nature, provided nature is suitably clad. Modern fashions are regarded as impermissible. While the growing strength of cen¬sorship is a profound satisfaction and encouragement to the truly upright, it is evident that this method can never go far enough. A complete Index Ex¬purgatorius is the eventual aim, or better still, an Index Prohibitus. Thus far there has been devised only a broadly modeled White List here¬with presented for consideration. Stories, plays and poems are to be re¬garded as allowable in the following classes: (a) Political and business stories wherein honesty triumphs. (b) Sunday-school stories. © Children and farm stories. (d) Love stories; object, matri¬mony. (e) Nature stories, though it must be remembered that some animals are coarse in their habits. It is the League's plan to license only such authors as subscribe to the restrictions above. Others will be for¬bidden publication. Can any genu¬inely artistic heart fail to thrill at the prospect of a brighter, cleaner, purer world, wherein all the books will be of the school of Harold Bell Wright or Gene Stratton-Porter; wherein Apoll¬yon and all his legions of darkness will flee before Pollyanna with her forces of sweetness and light?